Has Framework made progress on battery drain while sleeping? I'm interesting in getting one but that sticks out as a big problem for me.

Similar experience over here on one of the earlier 11th gen models and recently on a new 12th gen model as well (build quality feels a lot improved vs the early stuff too, fyi). People are still right to call BS on having to run any of this to get decent battery performance but it is possible to get if you jump through a few hoops. Next step for distros should really be sane defaults for this stuff and/or an option to tell the installer it's going on a laptop/non workstation desktop so that it gets sane defaults for the laptop based on efficiency per watt rather then the sane defaults for a server/workstation (max performance).

Yep, and another frustration with Fedora in particular are the defaults for DNF. I don't get why the distro doesn't set `/etc/dnf/dnf.conf` with `max_parallel_downloads=10` and `fastestmirror=True`. sudo dnf update is so much faster with that (though you still need to keep away from the GNOME software app).

I havent really ised redhat based distros since redhat 5.4....If you want to go for a walk on the wild side try cachyos. It makes arch easy and has some nice defaults (atleast for kde, not sure about gnome, as i went kde them recently hyprland). It also has v3 and some v4 architecture compiled packages which are more performant on newer cpus. The pacman defaults are reasonable as well regarding parallel downloads.

I can understand distributions not having optimal settings for every laptop under the sun, but it seems like a no-brainer to at least create a repository of power config profiles for different models that users can submit to, eventually creating a decent library that could then be integrated into the settings app or and first run wizard.

Whilst not strictly for power settings, NixOS has a repository where users can contribute general optimized settings for their hardware.

https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware

Not sure why this is downvoted, that's awesome on NixOS's part.